Meeting on Web Efficiency and Robustness

April 19, 1996

Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Notes from the meeting

Organized by the World Wide Web Consortium. Hosted by Digital Equipment Corporation's Cambridge Research Laboratory.

• Meeting Profile
• Agenda
• Hotel Information
• Organization

Meeting Profile

For some background information on some of the issues in Web infrastructure, see the following problem statement. To solve these (and other problems) that the Internet and Web infrastructure face, we would like attendance from researchers and others with serious experience in the following areas:

• Distributed systems and distributed object systems
• Network transport and routing
• Internet network operations
• World Wide Web protocol architecture

We expect this to be the first in a series of meetings.

Some likely discussion topics:

• How can we design and engineer the Web to industrial strength, and the same level of reliability exhibited by telephone systems, but exhibiting better behavior under peak load than telephone systems?
• What requirements does the network itself place on future Web architecture?
• The Web presents a major operational load to the network, and management overhead to network operators. What requirements need to be met to ease the lives of network operators?
• What role does caching play in the Web of the future?
• What role does replication of data play in this architecture? For reliability? For economic geographic distribution of information? How do clients find the "nearest" copy of information?
• Does distributed object technology play a role in this architecture? If so, how and where?
• What role should new Internet technologies (e.g. multi-cast) play in satisfying these requirements?
• Would information from the routing layers of the network allow for finding "nearby" copies of information efficiently?

Preliminary Agenda

Chair/facilitator: Jim Gettys (W3C/Digital)

Friday April 19, 1996:

We invite proposals for presentations from attendees. Please contact Jim Gettys ([email protected]) if you would like to present. The meeting will start at 9:00AM. An agenda will be posted here when ready.

Organizational information

Meeting chair: Jim Gettys (W3C/Digital)
Administrative coordinator: Susan Hardy ([email protected])

The meeting will take place at Digital's Cambridge Research Laboratory, close to MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

• Directions to Digital's Cambridge Research Laboratory.
• Hotel:

         Doubletree Guest Suites Boston/Cambridge
         400 Soldiers Field Rd.
         Boston, MA 02134
         617-783-0090
         Rate:  $149.00 for the evening of April 18th.
         Code:  MIT/W3C
         DEADLINE for Doubletree reservations:  April 4, 1996.
 

• Please be sure to reserve a room as soon as possible are secure. Rooms are hard to come by that week as the 100'th running of the Boston Marathon happens the Monday of that week.
• Travel Time from Meeting: The hotel is approximately a 15 minute taxi ride (during rush hour) to the meeting site in Cambridge. Please contact Susan Hardy at the W3C if you have any problems reserving a room.
• Some web resources on Cambridge.

Unless otherwise arranged, meeting participants must book and pay their own travel and accommodation. Lunch and coffee will be covered by W3C.

Researchers in the field can participate by invitation. To receive an invitation, please submit a position statement in HTML, no more than 5K bytes, by April 5 as space is limited. There is no registration fee. Participants are strongly encouraged to provide position papers on these or closely related topics in advance of the workshop to be made publicly available via this page on W3C's Web site. To register, please contact:

  Susan Hardy
   email: [email protected]
   phone: +1-617-253-2613
   fax: +1-617-258-5999
 
  Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  Laboratory for Computer Science
  545 Technology Square
  Cambridge, MA 02139
  USA
 
 Please include the following information:
   First Name:				Last Name:
   Title:
   Company:
   Address:
   City:			State:		Country:		Zip:
   Email address:
   Telephone:				Fax:
   URL of Position statement: